


Darkest Night

by Mundivore



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Crystal Gems, Fluff, Gen, Holidays, POV Third Person Limited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 13:48:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17245355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mundivore/pseuds/Mundivore
Summary: In which Connie learns to conduct cross-species cultural exchange, how to fly a magical kite without getting a bloody nose, and what really makes a Crystal Gem.





	Darkest Night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [realfakedoors](https://archiveofourown.org/users/realfakedoors/gifts).



“What are you doing for holidays, Steven?” Connie asked.

“Hm?” He looked up from the book he was reading. “Oh. Not much. Why?”

“My mom wanted to invite you and your dad to Winterfeast, but wasn’t sure if you and the gems did anything usually. The gems are invited too, but I kind of figured—”

“Yeah, they’re not great company for uh, feasting, especially since Amethyst’s the only one who really eats anything. It uh… it gets a bit awkward.”

“Right.” Connie snickered a little. “But we’d still love to have you all.”

“Um, sure. Probably.” Steven scratched his head. “Uh… What day is Winterfeast, again?”

“What day is—Steven!” Connie laughed. “It’s the biggest holiday of the month! You can’t just forget which day Winterfeast is!”

“Hey, you take that back! I can forget anything I want, and you can’t stop me!” He turned his head in a facade of offense before cracking up and looking back at her.

“Goofball,” she said, flicking his nose.

“Okay, but seriously,” Steven said. “What day is it?”

“Seriously?”

“Listen! The gems obviously don’t celebrate it, and dad’s really more of a New Year’s person, he doesn’t ever do anything on Winterfeast. I mean, once he gave out deals at the carwash that day, but we’ve never really done anything special.”

“Wait, wait—a carwash, in the dead of winter?”

“There’s a reason it was a deal!”

“Okay, okay! But I bet you know what day it is, like, on a subconscious level or something. Maybe try guessing, before I tell you?”

Steven creased his brows in thought.

“Twenty-fourth?”

“Nope. Real close, though.”

“Twenty-third?”

“You’re two away!”

“Oh no,” Steven groaned. “Don’t say it’s on the twenty-first!”

“Nah, it’s the twenty-fifth. You were closer the first time.”

“Oh! Whew,” Steven said. “That’s good. The twenty-first is probably the one day all month I absolutely couldn’t go on.”

“Do you have something planned?”

“Uh… not really. Well, yes, but not with like. Anyone else. It’s a gem thing.”

Steven rubbed the back of his head awkwardly. Connie leaned in intently.

“What do you mean? Is it a scheduled mission, or something? Wait, that doesn’t make sense…”

“The gems do a thing on the solstice every year,” Steven cut in. “It’s… kinda like a holiday? It’s a tradition, anyway.”

“A gem holiday! Wow! That’s… fascinating, Steven! What do you do?”

“Well uh… um… we go out to—”

“Ah, don’t tell her, Steven!” Amethyst interrupted from somewhere near the vicinity of the fridge. She continued with her mouth half-full of… something. “She can come.”

“Really?” Connie lit up in excitement.

“Yeah, sure. I don’t see why not.”

“You sure Pearl will be fine with it?” Steven asked. “She and Garnet are the ones really in charge.”

“Uhhhh…” Amethyst swallowed whatever she was munching on. “One sec.”

She trundled over to the temple door, and opened it to Pearl’s room.

“Hey Pearl!” she shouted in. “Come ‘ere!”

Pearl’s shouted reply was audible from the Steven’s room, but not comprehensible.

“You think Connie can come to the solstice with us?” Amethyst called back.

Silence, in response. A few moments later, Pearl came in through the temple door, and it shut behind her. Her expression was somewhat grave, and Connie shrunk back a little as she suddenly started to feel as if she’d mistakenly tread on delicate ground.

“Are you sure—” Pearl began to ask.

“Uh, yeah.” Amethyst rolled her eyes. “She’s a Crystal Gem too, right?”

Connie’s heart did a little somersault, even if she didn’t really believe it. The thought that she could be a Crystal Gem… apparently meant something to Pearl, as well. She visibly contemplated the matter before apparently resolving some internal conflict and smiling.

“I suppose she is, isn’t she?” She walked into the middle of Steven’s room, and looked up to her protegé on the bed above.

“Connie!” Pearl declared.

“Yes ma’am!” Connie sat up a little straighter.

“Make sure you check with your parents before you come. We’ll be leaving at around eleven in the morning, and we’ll be out almost all night. ”

“Aye-aye, ma’am.” Connie saluted, and started to grin.

“Huh,” Steven said as Pearl started to head back to her room.

“What, Steven?” Connie asked.

“Nothing, really,” Steven said, smiling. “I’m just, uh, surprised. In a good way.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. It’s… well, it’s not a sad kind-of holiday, but it’s a little… serious, I guess? You’ll respect that.”

“Huh.” Connie dropped her voice low so that Amethyst wouldn’t overhear, and flopped back onto the bed. “You sure I should come, then? It sounds a little personal.”

“It  _ is _ a little personal,” Steven clarified. “And Pearl thinks you should be a part of it, now.”

“Okay, but what  _ is _ it? Does it have a name?”

“We don’t really have a name for it, really? It’s just the solstice. It’s about… that it’s the longest night of the year,” Steven said. “And some people can’t make their own light. That’s what it’s about.”

❅

“Woah,” Connie said, her breath fogging up the air. “I thought Steven and I explored most of the warp pads… I don’t think I’ve seen this one before. Or maybe… wait a second…”

Ice and snow dominated the hilly landscape. The outlines of dozens of weapons loomed out of the snowbanks, and occasionally a truly tremendous device of war had simply refused to be covered at all—axes and swords at least twice Garnet’s height, and the protruding shafts of unknown polearms.

What really jogged Connie’s memory, though, were the snow-covered islands, floating gently in the distance. They were getting harder to see in the evening light—it’d just before noon back in Beach City, but it was nearing sunset here.

“Wait, is this the Strawberry Battlefield?”

“Yeah,” Amethyst said quietly, as she stood behind on the warp pad with Steven and Connie. She took a deep breath of the winter air, and gave a satisfied sigh. “Looks a bit more grim in the winter, huh?”

“Talk about it…” Connie muttered as Amethyst hopped off the pad.

“Let’s go get a broom!” Steven said, nudging Connie with his elbow. “We’ve gotta clear off a patch to put our chairs and stuff on, and then we can get started.”

Pearl and Garnet had already gotten started on clearing away a spot around a small pile of  bags and containers. Garnet was using a big push-broom, and Amethyst was uprighting a smaller one from the pile. Pearl alone used a shovel—though she handled it very gingerly, leaving nearly half an inch of snow on the ground for others to take care of.

The work went by fairly quickly, and Connie quickly found herself working up a sweat in spite of the cold. The area which Pearl had implicitly defined as the one they were clearing out—by shoveling out a large ring around the pile—was fairly large, maybe seventy or more feet across. Definitely more than was needed to set up whatever tents and chairs they seemed to have brought with them.

“What do we need this much room for?” She whispered to Steven. They were working in combination—she’d selected one of the larger sweep-brooms, and while it made quick work of the snow-piles, it was unwieldy and had difficulty catching everything. It also got occasionally stuck on piles of  detritus or fallen weaponry. Steven filled in the gaps she missed, with a smaller and more standard sweep-broom.

“We’re gonna be setting up a bunch of lights,” Steven said. “And we want to have a lot of room to anchor them.”

“Anchor them?”

“Yeah, it’s a lot like balloo—woah, look out!”

Connie started a little and looked around.

“No, no, it’s fine,” Steven said. “Just… right there!”

He pointed down to the ground where she’d just been sweeping. Where she’d uncovered… something crystalline, and glittery? She leaned down to pick it up, and her stomach dropped a little as she held it.

It was a tiny pea-sized gem shard. 

“Uh, Steven?” 

Steven nudged her with a smile.

“Give it here,” he said. She complied, and he quickly bubbled it and ran to the center. Connie followed close behind.

“Connie found one!” Steven called out. “First one?”

“Nope,” Garnet called from her side of the circle. “Other side!”

Connie followed Steven around to the other end of the pile, where a pair of shards were already floating in a purple-red bubble.

“Aw,” Steven said, sounding barely disappointed. “Maybe next time.”

“Wait, it’s a game?” Connie said. She was still feeling slightly disturbed by their discovery. “Isn’t that like, a piece of a person?”

“I mean, it’s only kind of a competition,” Steven said. “We gotta bubble all the ones near the surface anyway, so they don’t reform or anything. And we always find some, so… you know?”

“One day, we won’t find any.”

Connie jumped a little at Pearl’s sudden appearance—she was carrying her own bubbled gem-shard.

“I’m looking forward to then.” Pearl said, pushing her bubble into place next to the other too. She smiled awkwardly as Connie stared at her, before apologizing and getting back to work.

“We can’t really do anything about what happened to them,” Steven said as the two of them started making their way back. “But, we can make sure their pieces don’t reform here, right?”

“I guess,” Connie said, nodding. “It still feels… bad, though. That they’re even here.”

“Yeah,” Steven agreed. “Yeah.”

“So… why call it a holiday?”

“I dunno. I guess maybe not all holidays are about feeling good?”

“Mm. Maybe not.” Connie went back to brushing away the snow, paying a bit more attention to where she stepped, now. They didn’t find any more gem shards that night, but Connie kept her eyes out anyway.

❅

 

The sum total of the supplies the gems had brought included the following: two tents, a large table, a very large thermos of hot cocoa, a small crystalline device which floated eerily but was comfortably warming, a trough-like container full of small stones attached to six-inch long rods by fine silvery wire, and around a hundred or so small stakes with colorful paint at the tops.

All that, save for the stakes, were deployed in the middle of the clearing they’d made. The stakes were spread fairly uniformly about the rest of the clearing, the joining the protruding hafts and handles of weapons in an almost comical sort of contrast. The dimming light made it harder and harder to notice the contrast, though, and Connie found herself standing closer to Steven and the warming-crystal as the stars began to emerge.

As Amethyst drove home the last of the stakes, Garnet tossed the first of the rod-and-stone contraptions to Steven.

“Steven’ll start us off,” she decided.

“Got it! Thanks, Garnet!” He ran a little bit away from the central camp, and took the rod in his hand, and began to spin it above his head. The small rock went about him faster and faster, and as it picked up speed it started to glow white, the thread seeming to elongate further and further the brighter the stone got. When it got up to a speed Steven was satisfied with, he angled it for a couple more spins before tossing it up into the sky. The stone exploded in brilliance as it flew up, then hung overhead in defiance of gravity.

“Woah…” Connie muttered to herself.

Gingerly, Steven dragged the light back above of the camp, pulling it by a thread that seemed to have vanished. With a jittering motion of his hand, he lowered the rod down to the ground and tied it around the table leg, then raised an arm in triumph. Amethyst and Pearl applauded briefly, but quickly rushed over to get their own.

“Tah-dah!”

“Well done, Steven,” Garnet said, patting his head as she looked up at the light. “You got it nice and high this time!”

“D’aww, shucks,” he muttered as Garnet started towards the trough of lights. “I do my best!”

“That was really cool,” Connie said, walking over to Steven. She grabbed him by the arm as she looked around at the freshly-lit landscape. “Wow, look Steven! It’s… wow!”

It’d been grim in the low-light, but underneath the artificial star, the battlefield looked a little bit magical. The reflected light off the snow, Connie realized, was the missing element. The sunset was too glaring and too indefinite to produce the sparkling effect that the gem lights made. The night got brighter still as Pearl and Amethyst spun up the lights they’d taken, a light blue and periwinkle in color respectively, and cast them out over the field.

“Come on!” Steven tugged Connie along to the box. “Let’s get you some, they’re really fun!”

Connie resisted being pulled a bit.

“You sure?”

“It’s easy, let’s go!”

❅

 

Already, the battlefield had taken on a different tone—the multi-color lighting as the gems cast their lights far across the battlefield and the colorful stakes made it feel a bit like half a carnival had been set up.

“Getting it up there is just as easy as it looks!” Steven told Connie as she started swinging her light gently above her head. “The tricky part is controlling it once its up: it’s pretty sensitive, and likes to move towards the rod a lot more than it likes to move away from it.”

She bit her upper lip a little to concentrate as her light picked up speed and started to glow a pleasant yellow. It was an odd sensation that the faster she spun it, the easier it was to keep it moving. Then, she translated some of her personal practice into the situation, throwing it like she would a grappling-hook. To her satisfaction, the light flared and shot up into the sky.

“Wow, nice height!” Steven shielded his eyes as he watched it go up. “Your first try was way better than mine was!”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I accidentally sent mine at too much of an angle. Ended up at head-height in the next field over.”

Connie smiled at the image as she experimentally interposed her hand between the rod and the light. No resistance at all.

“Huh. So it just… floats up there?” 

“Yup, you can move it around, though. With the stick. It’s kinda like flying a kite! Except… way different.”

“Huh. So if I…” Connie experimentally dragged the control-rod to the side, watched as her lemon-yellow light went along with her movement, leaving a brief trail behind for a second or so. There were a couple of intricacies: the light sped up and slowed down relative to its distance from her, and moved much further when she moved her hand more quickly—like mouse acceleration, she commented. Steven laughed after she explained to him what that was.

With a few minutes of wrangling, they negotiated her light over an unlit portion of the battlefield, and when she was satisfied, she gave a small shout of happiness.

“Got it! Now I just tie it down?”

“Yup!” Steven said, cheerfully. Then, “No, wait—” as she began to take it to the ground.

_ zzzz-donk _

The light-stone came whizzing in as Connie lowered the rod, careening right into her face. The stone hung limp on its little wire as she dropped her face into her hands, giggling a bit.

“Ah! Sorry! That was my fault, are you okay?” Steven asked, running up to Connie’s side.

“Uh’m fine,” Connie said, stumbling a little. “S’just a bloo’y node. Ow.”

“Here, one sec. I’ll get you all patched up! Let me see?”

Connie revealed her bloody nose to Steven, and he stuck a wet finger on it.

“Cold,” Connie said as she shuddered, at the touch, then winced as the brief stinging of the healing magic did its work. “Thangs, Steben.”

“I’m really sorry, I meant to warn you. They  _ really _ like to go down, a lot more than going up. You gotta kind of… shake them down, if that makes sense.”

“Don’t worry abou’ it,” Connie said, shaking her head and grinning a little. “I’m habing fun. Here, one segond.”

She took a few messy seconds in the snow to clear her nose. When she turned back around, Steven was holding the rod out to her.

“Wanna try again?” He asked, cautiously.

“I mean, yeah! I think I’m getting the hang of it!”

 

❅

 

“Wow, you’re getting pretty good at this, huh Connie?” Amethyst sauntered up to the kids while keeping her eyes up in the sky, managing her own light.

“Yeah! I’ve gotten three tied down already!”

“Oh yeah? That’s pretty good…” 

Connie was focusing on getting the perfect position for her light (sea-green), right next to one of Steven’s (magenta). Steven was on his knees, in the process of tying his down, when out of the blue a cyan light zipped into the picture. The light drew a wide, wild circle around Connie’s light, hanging in the sky for a few moments before the trail began to fade.

“Hey!” Connie glared at Amethyst. “You’ll throw off my positioning!”

“Fair game,” Amethyst said tauntingly, her light bouncing back and forth nearby. “Whatchu gonna do about it?”

With neat and pristine movements, a white light flew in and drew a clean little circle around Amethyst’s light before zipping off. 

“Hey, I was gloating!” Amethyst complained.

“Fair game!” Pearl replied from across the field.

“I’ll show you fair game!” Amethyst shouted as she ran over to Pearl, her light careening off with her.

Connie snickered, then looked back at the sky with a bit of a frown. Her positioning  _ was _ off.

“Don’t mind them, if you don’t want, it’s just kind of a game we—” Steven was cut off by Connie drawing a careful circle around Steven’s light. The magenta light shot out of the circle as Steven dived forward desperately. Connie snickered.

“Well if that’s how we’re playing it…” Steven muttered with a smile. 

His light took off and around, making wide but deceptively fast arcs in an attempt to get around Connie’s light. Connie quickly developed a semblance of her own style—quick, curling flicks to get all the way around Steven in a single motion—but Steven’s constant movement ended up being a practiced defense. 

“You play a lot like a lot like Pearl,” Steven laughed after another close save.

“Agh! You make this look so easy!” Connie grit her teeth as she came in for another pass, and ended up having to zip out to avoid Steven’s half-arc.

“I’ve just had more practice,” Steven said, laughing again. “If you think I’m good, you should get a load of Garnet!”

Connie glanced around. Pearl and Amethyst were still in fast competition, but Garnet was positioning another light (lime-green), seemingly without a care.

“You think we can get her together?” Connie whispered to Steven.

“We can try,” he said, grinning conspiratorially.

They crept as close as they dared to Garnet’s light before launching a twin assault—Steven’s arc sweeping out wide on the right while Connie’s dove straight in from behind, angling left. Garnet’s light didn’t react for nearly a whole second, then threaded the needle with shocking speed and spiraled outward with mechanical precision, stranding Connie and Steven within a nautilus-shell shaped barrier.

“Watch out!” Connie exclaimed.

“I’ve got it!” Steven’s arcing light raced up the nautilus, preventing Garnet from closing it while the center of the spiral faded. Connie escaped through the first available edge, and regrouped with Steven, dancing out with long points to force Garnet to make larger circles while Steven’s arc traced out ‘safe’ zones for her to return to.

“She’s got no openings,” Connie said. “We can’t do this!”

“Sure we can,” Steven replied. “We just have to wait for the cavalry!”

Right on queue, Pearl and Amethyst’s lights darted into frame, Amethyst tracing out a dome around Connie and Steven’s barrier while Pearl moved to intercept Garnet’s escape. Connie glanced at Garnet on the ground, and noticed just barely in the starlight, two things:

She was smiling, and her hand was holding not one, but two rods.

“It’s a trap!” Connie warned, all too late. Garnet raised her hand to seize the other rod, and her one light suddenly split into two. Together, the lights shot out of the dome in opposite directions, encircling Pearl on the way to sweeping wide around the rest. Amethyst and Steven were too late to react to the ruse, and while Connie was able to move soon enough, she wasn’t fast enough to save them, and Garnet caught them all.

There was a collective groan at the resolution.

“Garnet. Wins.” She punctuated her triumph by tossing one rod back into the same hand as the other and tracing them together, the lights dancing as if brought together by gravitational pull.

“Garnet  _ always _ wins!” Amethyst complained.

“Future vision is too good,” Steven agreed. 

“We got closer, this time,” Pearl chimed in, hopefully.

“You were closer this time,” Garnet affirmed with a nod. “But still not close enough. Maybe next time.”

 

❅

 

“So,” Mrs. Maheswaran asked from the driver’s seat. “How was it?”

“Hmm?” Connie yawned, drowsy from the night. The final moments of the night were still replaying in her brain.

_ Steven nudged her. _

_ “I think we’re getting a speech,” he said. “We don’t always get a speech.” _

_ Garnet held the last light contemplatively, standing by an icy haft she clearly meant to tie it to once she threw it. _

“I’m not exactly going to pretend I’m not curious about a… magical alien holiday,” Connie’s mom said. “What did you do? Was it… weird? Or normal? Or interesting?”

“Mm,” Connie said, nodding. “It was fun.”

“I thought you said it was going to be ‘serious.’”

“It was… but it was also fun. Serious fun.”

“What did you do?”

“We went out to a big field, and lit it up.”

“Oh? Why’s that?”

_ Garnet was holding the last light in her hands, thinking. _

_ “Gems,” Garnet said, and Connie felt somehow included. “Many of our comrades… were broken, here on this planet. In this fight for Earth, for freedom, for humanity, and for so many other things. _

_ “We—the Crystal Gems—promised them something. And we could talk about all those things and what they are… but there was only one that really mattered, mattered more than all the rest. We promised them hope. We  _ fulfilled  _ that promise.” _

“It was… kind of like New Year’s Day,” Connie said. “But also, like Memorial Day.”

“Why light up the field, though?”

“It was a battlefield. Lighting it up was… a symbol.”

_ “This place is not the place where the most gems were broken. It isn’t the place where the most harm was caused, the most suffering felt. Those places are too many, too scattered, too lost to find and count. No, we come here to remember them, because this is where we had our greatest victories. Our closest calls. Somewhere we became familiar with, where we fought often. We come here because this place most resembles what we stood for. Why we stand for it.” _

“Oh. Remembering the dead?”

“Sort of. More like… keeping a promise. I think we did good.”

_ “Crystal Gems give each other hope. There wasn’t a single one of us who would have joined, if it weren’t for this: that being a Crystal Gem, you know that even on the darkest nights,  _ **_especially_ ** _ on the darkest nights, there will be light. We aren’t going to give that up just because we’re the only ones left. _

_ “That’s why,” Garnet said, glancing at me, “We’re here. On the darkest night.” _

_ “…Making hope,” Connie finished, her voice raw. _

_ Garnet smiled, the multi-colored stars glittering above Connie’s reflection in her visor, and Connie swore she could see the lights in the sky speak, and twirl, and dance, and watch, and laugh. All the lost souls of Crystal Gems that she would never meet. _

_ And Connie swore, that in that moment she could see them all reach down, and touch her. _

_ And Connie, full of hope, finally felt like a Crystal Gem. _

_ Garnet threw the last light, and it blazed on its way up to the iridescent canopy. _

**Author's Note:**

> Made as a secret Santa gift for realfakedoors—rock on, friend.


End file.
